In the Way far north of Michiagn, one man tries to keep his grip on sanity and his connection to civilization

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Political Theater II

Christopher Lasch today seems a bit dated, especially if you read him for the psychology, which screams 1970s. But there are other, more interesting, ways to read him than as a 1970s Freud wannabe.

For instance, my take on Lasch has always been that his psychology is the least ineteresting part of his writing: it is far too strongly based on an uncritical acceptance of nineteenth-century moralism (family, work ethic, strong code of personal morality). As much as he’d deny this, Lasch’s psychological insights are really driven by a sort of New Deal/Old Left horror at the “irresponsibility” of the New Left that arose out of the 1960s. Especially these days when psychoanalysis has fallen into such general disrepute, Lasch seems to us to play at Freud far too much in Narcissism.

On the other hand when he plays Max Weber, updating Weber’s views on Western cultural institutions and their motors, Lasch strikes us as a keen and prescient observer. First-time readers of Weber are often struck by his positive evaluation of what has become for us a dirty word: “bureaucracy.” For us bureaucracy exists as the great opposite to capitalist entrepenuerialism, to responding to market needs, to bringing the people what they want and making a little on the side, to healthy competition.

But Weber’s bureaucracy didn’t replace these things, it replaced corruption, bribes, sweetheart deals between politicians and railroad barons, elections that were bought and sold, success based on who you knew and who you were related to. The Robber barons were aptly named, and though their relentless pursuit of self interest did have some Mandevillian payback for the social good, there was also a fairly steep social cost to pay: inhuman working conditions, displacement, huge inequalities and resultant social friction, and, not least, the communist movement which tyrannized so much of the world for 75 years can be said to be the direct result of the deeply unenlightened pursuit of self interest that Max Weber saw being rightfully tamed and directed through the rise of governmental, legal and administrative bureaucracies.

For Weber, it was through these structures that science, proceduralism and rationality could be introduced into a system whose driving force would remain self-interest.

Today, we are more likely to see the downside of bureaucracy: today, it is bureaucracy that seems to dominate, and the independent pursuit of self interest that seems marginal. Today, bureaucracy seems more to be a self-perpetuating structure, less interested in conditioning the motive forces in the economy than in creating a almost autonomous social subsystem. Bureaucracy tends not toward the conditioning of “reality,” it tends toward isolating itself from other realities to the greatest degree possible.

It is for insight into this tendency that we turn to Lasch.

The unfortunate thing is that Lasch was right about the tendency of public administration to attend to image while ignoring real outcomes. This would seem to be one of the easiest lessons to learn from the Vietnam experience “look first to your interests, not to your image” but not only have we not learned that lesson, hardly anyone seems to think the Vietnam experience has anything to say on that score.

The lesson of Vietnam seems to have been “take no military risks if you can possibly avoid them.” This is the foreign policy of Colin Powell. Over the last few years we have seen the emphatic rejection of that particular foreign policy, but what has taken its place?

American foreign policy is an interesting animal. Unlike domestic policy, foreign policy is not something we can easily dichotomize. In domestic policy we have fairly well-established liberal and conservative views, which dominate discussion. Then there is the slightly complicating views: libertarians who are economic conservatives and social liberals; fire-eating conservatives who (though they are loud in touting their nominal allegiance to the free market) are precisely the opposite–but these are minor complications.

In foreign policy, particularly since the fall of the Soviet Union, it is very difficult indeed to make sense of where the various players stand.

The greatest contrast in foreign policy thinking used to be between those who thought of the Soviet Union as a serious threat to the United States and those who did not. But even here there was great complication. There was the wing that thought that Kruschev’s threat to “bury” us was likely to come true if the US didn’t act dramtically and soon. There were those who thought that the Soviet Union was a highly corrupt and decaying system, but that they ought to be opposed to the utmost of our ability on moral grounds: they were evil, even if they were not the direct threat the first group made out, and they ought to be thwarted wherever possible. There were those who thought the Soviet system was weak and crumbling and that the fastest way to complete the process of collapse was detante and rapproachment. There were those who saw the Soviet Union as a viable and legitimate and perhaps even necessary alternative to the hegemony of Western capitalism, and that the only way forward was to learn to peacefully co-exist with our rival.

And there were many admixtures of these positions, all with different evaluations of 1) the ability of the US to tolerate any international rival; 2) state socialism; 3) the viability of the Soviet system; 4) the threat posed by the Soviet Union; 5) the most effective way to thwart that threat; 6) the danger of any prolonged confrontation with a well-armed nuclear rival; 7) the moral obligation of the US to thwart advances in Soviet power, regardless of our material interests in doing so.

Now, perhaps the most dramatic dichotomy in US foreign policy has been between the rationalists, influenced most crucially by the political scientist Henry Morgenthau; and the crusaders, which can be symbolized by Woodrow Wilson, but which actually has largely taken a different cast.

But the limited usefulness of this dichotomy is made immediately clear when we look at the background of the Vietnam scenario sketched out by Christopher Lasch. One of the main proponents of extending the Vietnam war to maintain US “credibility” was Henry Kissinger, a student of Morgenthau’s. Most of the people who cried out for the US to cut its losses and withdraw from Vietnam were moralists.

Morgenthau famously wrote an article inn the journal Foreign Affairs where he pretty much laid out the rationalist take on Vietnam: there were no interests there on behalf of which the US ought to sacrifice lives and money. Kissinger responded by weaving one out of the air: credibility.

On the other side, moralists desperately wanted to withdraw from Vietnam, but they wanted to do so for moral reasons, and therefore they concentrated much of their attention on portraying US intervention in Vietnam as not only stupid but as morally reprehensible. Though there was certainly room to argue that dropping millions of tons of high explosive on a country we had little hope of holding at the level of sacrifice we were willing to engage, the moralists went well beyond this, puffing up the legitimacy and humanity of a North Vietnamese government which was , in fact, ruthless, little concerned with the immediate welfare of its people, and not at all concerned with democratic notions of legitimacy.

Unfortunately for all of us, the Morgenthau tradition has passed down to us largely through Henry Kissinger, who still has a great deal of influence over our foreign policy, both through his students and through his being consulted at times of high foreign policy drama.

For instance, Kissinger had a phone conversation with Condoleeza Rice directly before the launch of the most recent intervention in Iraq, urging the administration to pull the trigger on war so as to maintain US credibility: The US could not threaten to do something so prominent and so often and then not do it, regardless of how stupid that action might be.

Hans Morgenthau did not think reputation and image were negligible concerns. Morgenthau, in fact wrote to quite the opposite effect:

The prestige of a nation is its reputation for power. That reputation, the reflection of the reality of power in the mind of the observers, can be as important as the reality of power itself. What others think about us is as important as what we actually are.

But Morgenthau wrote in 1965 that Vietnam was mainly a moral crusade, and that since our resources were limited, we could not afford to undertake moral missions which were negligible in terms of interest, as Vietnam was.

Kissinger, though, institutionalized the notion that symbolism trumps all, and for Kissinger and for the current administration, the “mind of the observers” is all that matters, because they have no notion whatsoever of what the true power interests of the US are, what counts as a true (as opposed to an apparent) threat, and what counts as true (as opposed to seeming) security.

Our foreign policy has become a Brechtian perfromative theater, where real blood is spilt and real power gets expended on pursuit of image, rather than material gain.

Adverse whaa?

The title is a riff on the town I live in, Traverse City, MI.
But I also use “adverse” in the sense of “going in the opposite direction” in reference to myself. I tend to be a bit contrarian. I don’t trust the consensus on a lot of things, and I like putting people’s assumptions to the test. (Hopefully my own as well as others’.) Over time, as I fill these pages with my contrarian and sometimes cranky views and arguments, I hope this will become indeed an “Adverse City” for people who cherish unexamined assumptions about the world.
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